Thursday, June 26, 2014

What I'm doing on my summer vacation

Gad, but I love the summer.  First of all there's the weather.  So long as the AC in my house doesn't break, I say bring on the heat.  I like a real summer, and we've had bits of it although at times it's been too cool and wet.  The only thing I really don't like about this time of year is mosquitoes.

The horrible winter and early spring are still exacting their price re. one my favorite parts of the summer - fresh produce at the Union Square Farmers' Market.  Generally you get strawberries by mid-May, then by the start of June it goes full Technicolor.  Blueberries, red and black raspberries, apricots, soon after that peaches and blackberries, etcetera.  This year is different.  Blueberries and red raspberries were both 2 + weeks late, no black raspberries yet, and apricots and peaches may simply not happen in the Northeast this year.  That's a shame as they're way better than the stuff that gets shipped here from far away.  So I am still waiting for full Technicolor, and may have to wait until June 2015 (assuming the next winter is less awful).

OK, back to the summer positives. Weeks that aren't jammed full with appointments are one nice feature - even leaving aside classes, my calendar is never so open during the rest of the year.  And as it happens my summer travel (in the school calendar sense) has been scheduled just for May and August, so open time yawns in front of me.  But that's a good thing, and I wish there were more.

On the work front, I've just finished a draft of an article entitled "Multiple Myopia, Multiple Selves, and the Under-Saving Problem."  The piece will end up being the headline piece in a spring 2015 "Commentary Issue" of the Connecticut Law Review, where there will also be invited commentators.  I will post a draft of the article in SSRN at some point well before that, but I want to sit on it at least briefly first.  After all, while there are second bites at the apple (aka revisions before publishing), I suspect that the first SSRN draft is the one that gets read by the greatest number of people.

I've now started work on a piece that I will be co-authoring with a friend that addresses Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  More on that in due course, including on the underlying event at which we'll be presenting the paper.

In the fall, I'll be writing a short Tax Notes piece for a conference to which I've been invited concerning certain of the perennial tax reform issues that are always on the table.  More on that in due course, after that event has been publicly announced.

And after that, I guess I'll have to see, though there are several possible candidates.  But I don't think I'll be writing much in international tax in the immediate future (as I like doing new things and changing my focus as needed to feel fresh).

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